


the soul that you used to be

by Authoress



Series: WRITE-O-WEEN [1]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Halloween, Haunted House, M/M, and in which tsukki must defend his dinosaurs, ghost au, in which kuroo fucks up, obvs character death for obvs reasons, slight deviations from canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-07
Updated: 2015-10-07
Packaged: 2018-04-25 06:27:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4950130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Authoress/pseuds/Authoress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He closes his eyes, savoring the memory, and whispers:</p><p>“Until we meet again.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	the soul that you used to be

**Author's Note:**

  * For [punkflunked](https://archiveofourown.org/users/punkflunked/gifts).



> yeah yeah what the fuck is editing
> 
> HAPPY BIRTHDAY (again) SCOUT pls accept this thing that grew out of control (again) to no one's surprise
> 
> im sorry there's no smut
> 
> also demigirl yaku is the only yaku i write so yeah

“Kuroo, _don’t_.”

Yaku’s voice brings pause to Kuroo’s first confident step forward. He tilts his head back to catch a glimpse of the way Yaku bites her lip, shakes her head minutely, arms tightening around herself. Kai is pursing his lips, obviously torn, but even Taketora seems hesitant, a muscle tightening in his jaw. A huff of breeze chases leaves across the ground and somewhere down the road, a dog rows. That’s the final straw for Kuroo.

“She’s just a kitten,” he pleads with his teammates. “It’s too cold for her to be out.” When they don’t say anything, he adds, “You heard that dog.”

“But it’s—!” Taketora blurts before stopping himself, not wanting to be the one to say _that_ , to admit he believes _that_. “Stupid country folk rumor,” he mutters instead. He doesn’t need to elaborate. They all know what rumor he’s talking about.

“Kuroo…” Kai presses. “I know you don’t want her to get hurt, but Rin was a stray anyway—she knows these streets better than we do. That entire house is in disrepair. One wrong step and your foot is through the floorboard. Maybe you get away with a splinter; maybe you break your ankle.”

“It’s not worth the risk,” Yaku interrupts. “Come on, training camp has just begun. What were you going to with a stray kitten anyway?”

Kuroo thinks about the tiny ginger bundle, squawking noisily in his arms and purring like her life depended on it. How skinny she was, how she tore apart the pieces of pork bun he fed her. His heart clenches.

“I’ll only be a minute,” he says with finality. Yaku looks like she might protest, but Kuroo fixes her with his fiercest captain stare and she grimaces.

“Five minutes,” she grinds out. “That’s all we’ll give you before we call the cops and report you for trespassing.”

“So harsh!” Kuroo laughs. He takes another step off the path and into weeds and cigarette butts, rotted wood and empty beer cans. “It’ll be fine,” he assures his teammates with an easy smile. His carefree expression does little to mollify their worries.

 _No use second guessing,_ he thinks, and turns on his heel, stepping into the house (the decrepit and decaying dump) with a soft ‘ _tadaima_ ’ murmured under his breath. _Rin, please be somewhere close_.

Kuroo had been prepared to use his phone’s flash to light his way, but with a sizable hole in the roof and the full moon pouring down, most of the insides of the house were lit up. Kuroo only needs to use his phone to check under debris, making kissing noises to call out his cat and calling for Rin in a soft voice, such a low and soft voice. A voice too quiet to wake the dead.

 _Shut up, Tetsurou,_ Kuroo berates himself. Rin was a cat; her hearing was good enough to pick up even a low voice such as his own. No need to yell and scare her off.

Honestly, despite the obvious wear and tear from the elements and inevitable vandalism, the house isn’t nearly as bad as it looked from the outside. The wood floors hardly creak where Kuroo steps, making Kai’s worries moot. The walls are in good shape aside from dirt and the occasional spot of mold—even some of the furniture has been left intact. Kuroo sticks his head into one of the bedrooms and nearly laughs. There’s a collection of plastic dinosaurs up on a shelf.

 _What a nerdy kid this one must have been_ , Kuroo snickers to himself. A brief check under the bed reveals no life aside from a spider in her web.

He wanders back out into the hall, checking the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom to no avail. He’s beginning to question if he saw Rin run into this house in the first place. Honestly, no cats and no ghosts, how boring was that?

Kuroo freezes. Ah, so he finally admits that the old urban legend had been at the back of his mind.

He’d been trying to ignore it, lest the dark corners of the house seem more haunted, or the spider under the bed more cursed, the dead of the house, undead. Most of what ghost stories depended on was fear and the unknown. Tell someone something to make them afraid and throw them into an unknown situation and bam, terror. It was an old trick, but never failed.

Clearly, the story, while it may have been based on true events was not real itself. Golden eyes as big as the moon and a howling voice screaming at trespassers? Well, Kuroo supposes it must work well to keep out delinquent kids and vandals, given the relatively untouched state of the house. Preposterous, of course, but an excellent scare tactic.

 _Although,_ Kuroo thinks, frowning, _it’s in pretty poor taste to use an accident involving kids as a scary story._ Especially a tragedy like this one.

He ventures further into the house, running fingertips along the wall of a darkened hall past the hole in the ceiling. He grazes over paint and photo frames and— _fuck!_ Kuroo swears loudly and draws his hand away from the frame where the slashed a finger on a chip of glass. He sucks on the injured digit mournfully, glaring at the frame in question.

The glass on the frame is shattered, like someone took a fist to the glass. But, even more intriguing, Kuroo finds, is that the photo inside the frame has been shredded. Tentatively, he reaches in to touch the scraps. Unlike the glass, these look animalistic in their destruction, like some creature had torn at it with its teeth and claws.

 _Wow, Tetsurou,_ Kuroo thinks. _Way to get too deep in a ghost story._ He snorts, shaking his head and moving down the hall.

Except the next frame is broken. And the next. And the one after that. On either side of him, frames are shattered, family photos in various states of shreds. Glass cracks too loudly under his feet and Kuroo feels wrong, wrong, _wrong_. He tells himself it’s because it’s a personal attack on the family that used to live here.

(But it’s really because the claw marks never target the two smiling parents in the photos, always the other two figures, tall and faceless. Kuroo notes with hysterical amusement that one of them holds a volleyball under his arm.)

There’s only two rooms at the end of the hallway, one door closed and the other a yawning chasm, threatening to swallow Kuroo whole. His limbs tighten, muscles hard as steel, eyes fixed on the darkness as if those gold eyes would come for him the moment he looked away.

They do not come.

It takes a while, but eventually Kuroo gathers enough courage to look away from the open door, to inch closer to the other door, not actually closed, but cracked enough to seem unintimidating. Kuroo will play it safe. There’s no reason to wander into that black hole just yet.

And finally, fate is on his side. As Kuroo pushes open the door, he sees Rin in the middle of what appears to be the room of one of the children in the picture. It’s a mess, but in the teenager way, not the vandalism way. On the walls, volleyball posters peel away and on the bed lies an actual volleyball. Rin is standing on what might have been a jersey, once upon a time. _Karasuno_ …the high school down the street, the one hosting training camp this year…

Rin is shaking.

Kuroo doesn’t notice immediately, consumed by shock that the horror story was about a _Karasuno High volleyball player_ , but he catches on to how her legs tremble, how her tail is puffed and ears folded back, staring at the bed and _quivering_. Kuroo looks up. He doesn’t see anything.

Then, he does.

Ice spikes around his heart, growing and constricting it in a vise so he can’t speak, can’t breathe, can only watch in horror as golden eyes open on the wall behind the bed. They drip outwards, slipping off the wall and moving towards Rin, disembodied and wide. They do not see Kuroo, and he cannot move to save the cat.

Something is growing from the floor. It’s sticky and golden, twin amorphous blobs gradually taking shape, sharpening into clawed hands reaching for Rin. She hisses feebly, but the eyes and claws don’t slow their pursuit of her, lazily rising and stretching out. Kuroo feels tears well up in his eyes but he’s paralyzed—there’s nothing he can do to draw attention to himself, and Rin is too scared to move. He doesn’t want to watch his kitten die.

It’s strange, but—through the blur of his tears, in the moonlight, the eyes and claws almost seem to have a body, light as stardust and as translucent as moth’s wings. The tears fall, but the image doesn’t fall away with it.

The outline is of a starry ghost boy, tall and long-limbed, a body that sparkled like dust motes in sunlight and moved with the fluidity of water. His skin is little more than a plane of tiny golden flecks, shaping to form a body and clothes—a shadow of what might once have been living. Kuroo knows immediately that this is the boy in the photos.

And he doesn’t harm Rin. His claw-tipped hands pass right through her body with the slightest ruffle of breeze to tug at the jersey underneath her—gently, so that she hardly even stumbles off of it, looking confused and still rather frightened. The jersey is drawn upwards, dark enough against the ghost’s light body that it looks to be suspended in mid-air.

And the ghost boy embraces the jersey. Holds it close to his chest so tightly, Kuroo is sure it will rip. The boy’s shoulders hunch and shake. From where he had been hovering over the ground, slowly he sinks into and through the floor.

“ _Oh_ ,” Kuroo says, understanding.

Speaking is a mistake.

Instantly, the gentle and grieving bearing drops away, and Kuroo is face-to-face with the ghost from the legend. A gale rises from nowhere, whipping painfully at Kuroo’s face, tearing at his clothes, and the ghost boy drops the jersey, fading back into the shadows until only two massive golden eyes remain. Their gaze pierces Kuroo with an anger born from having a private and personal moment intruded upon, and Kuroo can’t quite tell if he’s wetting his pants.

The wind takes on a new, angrier air, smashing the shudders against the outside of the house and rattling furniture, cracking glass and _howling_. No, more than howling it was a yell, a scream—

_GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GETOUT **GETOUTGETOUTGETOUT—**_

Kuroo finds Rin and his legs, and he runs.

Down the hall of painful, broken portraits; past the room of dinosaurs where happiness may once have lived; and underneath the light of the moon that laughs and laughs at Kuroo for not believing. He bursts out, startling his friends, probably looking like he’d seen a— _ha_.

“Kuroo, _what_ —” Yaku starts, but Kuroo doesn’t let her finish.

“Rin’s fine, we’re leaving. _Now_.”

No one has the heart to argue.

 

\---------------------------

 

Kuroo doesn’t tell anyone about the ghost boy.

The first reason that comes to mind is that no one will believe him. _You just got spooked. It was probably a wild animal. Old houses always get drafty._ Kuroo’s not interested in people explaining away what he saw. There’s no doubt in his mind, only questions and fear.

Kenma doesn’t really care, but Kenma knows what’s going on immediately.

“Avoiding the house isn’t going to make the memory go away,” he mutters under his breath on the second day they take the long way back to the hotel they’re staying in. It’s probably just annoyance to Kenma, but the validation makes Kuroo stop in his tracks.

Unbeknownst to him, Kenma stumbled upon the second reason why Kuroo hasn’t told anyone: he’d simply hoped that if he ignored the experience, he would forget about the golden eyes and shaking shoulders. No such luck so far, but Kuroo wasn’t going to give up just yet.

“So you believe me,” he says casually.

Kenma shrugs. “You never told me what happened. You just looked really freaked out and went to be. Yaku told me about the house the next day.”

“I saw a ghost,” Kuroo blurts, then feels stupid. He doesn’t sound convincing at all, but maybe that’s because he hopes it wasn’t real (but he knows, he _knows_ ).

“Hmm,” Kenma replies, and that’s the end of their conversation.

Before they go to bed, though, Kenma suggests that Kuroo go back to the house, for closure. To find the ghost or find nothing, and be done with it. Just don’t involve him in any of that business, Kenma adds. He’s got enough horror with his video games; he doesn’t need actual ghosts and zombies.

Which brings Kuroo to reason number three, the reason he’s standing in front of the house again, Rin tucked in his jacket. She snuffles quietly but doesn’t complain at the sight of the house. Maybe she needs closure, too.

“Maybe I don’t want to share my ghost,” Kuroo says aloud. Rin sneezes. He opens the door and steps inside once again.

This time, Kuroo is purposefully loud. He stomps on the creakiest floorboards, raps on the walls, calls out for the ghost in a loud voice. There’s a certain power in being loud, a kind of fake confidence that Kuroo can hide his pounding heart behind.

“Hello, Ghost-kun? I know you’re here,” Kuroo starts. “Sorry for intruding!” The sunset glows red through the hole in the roof, but the moon is already shining. “I just want to say hi!”

Unsurprisingly, there is no response. Kuroo supposes it _is_ rather rude to invade someone’s house like this, but— _but curiosity killed the cat_ —but he has to know once and for all, has to apologize and maybe, maybe even offer the ghost his help. After all, weren’t ghosts trapped in this world, unable to move on? Maybe he could act as a ghost counselor or something.

He’s not stupid enough to provoke the ghost by going into _that_ room, but an idea does cross his mind. He enters the first bedroom, the one with dinosaurs. Quietly, Kuroo opens the window, allowing the beginnings of moonlight to shine into the room. Then, he proceeds to mock all the dinosaurs and marine posters on the wall.

“What kind of nerd has collectible dinosaurs in _mint condition_ boxes?”

“Ah yes, the T-rexosaurus.”

“Who cares what the length of a Lucifer dogfi—”

That bizarre wind whips up again, more like the annoyed lashing of a cat’s tail than true anger this time. It ruffles Kuroo’s clothes and hair, but no matter how he twists and turns, he can’t see the ghost boy. “ _Get out!_ ” The wind hisses. “Get out! Get out!”

“No way!” Kuroo calls out at nothing. “Not until I see the Indominus rex!”

“That’s not—she’s not even— _ugh_.” The wind—no, the _voice_ —spits out the words with such disgust Kuroo bursts out laughing. Hysterical laughter, of course, but still laughter and amazement that he actually provoked a ghost out of hiding.

“ _Listen_ ,” the ghost boy snarls, melting through the door and glaring at Kuroo, moonlight painting him bright and ethereal. “The _Indominus rex_ is fictional, made-up, futuristic _bullshit_. And it’s _Tyrannosaurus rex_ , you incompetent _moron_.”

Kuroo is delighted by him.

“So I take it you didn’t like Jurassic World,” Kuroo surmises, biting back a grin.

“Fuck you,” the ghost boy spits. He pauses. “Jurassic Park set too high a bar to ever make a comparable movie,” he concedes, sniffing disdainfully.

“This is you room, then?” Kuroo asks.

As if suddenly remembering Kuroo was an intruder, the ghost’s eyes sharpen. “It _was_ ,” he snaps. “Get out. You aren’t welcome here.”

Kuroo flops on his back, on the dirty floor. “But I’ve only just met you,” he protests. “Surely you could use someone to talk to?”

“No,” the ghost boy says flatly. “Leave.”

Kuroo sighs. “Fine. I got my closure. But I—” He pauses. “I wanted to say sorry for…the other night. I was just looking for my cat, I swear.”

The ghost boy had puffed up at the mention of that night, but his hackles lower when Kuroo mentions Rin. “Did I…scare her?” He asks tentatively. “I was trying to move slow so as not to startle her.”

“I think she’s okay now,” Kuroo says. “She was pretty scared seeing disembodied eyes and hands, though. We both were.”

The ghost boy scowls harder. Kuroo is a little worried he might hurt himself. “Having no presence is annoying as hell,” he mutters. “Scare away everything.”

“Why don’t you move on?” Kuroo asks softly. “Surely there must be some way to get out.”

The sadness is there and gone so quickly Kuroo might have imagined it. “…No,” the boy says at length, fading back into the wall. “There’s nothing for me after this.”

“Wait!” Kuroo calls, reaching out a hand, but his hands only brush through thin air as the ghost fades back into the wall. He darts out of the room, checking every corner of the house, but the ghost is gone. He doesn’t even burst out when Kuroo pokes his nose into _that_ room.

 

\--------------------------------

 

Kuroo goes back every night after that with a new set of insults to hurl at innocent marine life and ancient reptiles. And every night the ghost appears to rebuff and correct him with an annoyed curl to his lip and a roll of his eyes.

Kuroo doesn’t ever find out the ghost’s name, but the sign on the outside of the house says _Tsuk_ before in cuts off, so Kuroo takes to calling him Tsukki, much to the ghost’s immense irritation. He finds out that he was a middle schooler when he died, and that he hates volleyball more than anything. He never finds out anything about _that_ room.

“Okay, but you _look_ like a high schooler,” Kuroo protests.

Tsukki sighs. “I died over forty years ago. Do you think I want to look like a kid for forty years? Besides, movies about creepy children freak me out. If I’m going to haunt a place, I want to do it as an adult.”

Kuroo hums thoughtfully. “I suppose that makes sense.”

They’re sitting in the old living room. Well, Kuroo is spread across a couch and Tsukki is floating above him, back turned. It’s become somewhat routine for Kuroo to drop by for an hour or so before continuing to his hotel, and for Tsukki to begrudgingly tolerate his company. Kuroo shifts slightly. He’s well aware of a time limit for his stay in Miyagi, and even though Tsukki never asked him to, Kuroo has taken it upon himself to help the ghost out.

“It must get tiring, staying here,” Kuroo offers softly.

Tsukki is silent for a moment. “It is,” he admits. “But I don’t have a choice.”

“Why?” Kuroo pleads with him. “This place…this is the world of the living. Surely you realize you don’t belong here. It must be so lonely.”

“ _I deserve it_ ,” Tsukki whispers, barely audible, just a sigh of breeze.

“Tsukki—” Kuroo starts.

“It’s not your concern,” Tsukki says, shaking himself from his moment of vulnerability. “I can deal with it on my own.”

“Can you?” Kuroo challenges. “You seem to be doing a _great_ job so far.”

It might be too far, since Tsukki whips around, shooting down from the ceiling to snarl right in Kuroo’s face in all his spectral glory. “What do you know about me?” Tsukki spits.

“Nothing!” Kuroo spits back. “Listen, Tsukki,” he starts. “I don’t come here every day to mock you—I want to help, I really do. But all you ever do is evade me and shut down my questions…don’t you think it would be better to talk about this with someone?”

Tsukki doesn’t soften—Kuroo’s not sure if he _can_ —but some of the sharpness goes out of his posture and his eyes. He can’t meet Kuroo’s eyes. Suddenly, irrationally, Kuroo wants to cup his cheek and tell him everything will be alright. But when he reaches forward, his hand passes through thin air. _Of course,_ Kuroo thinks. _Different worlds, remember?_

“Please,” Kuroo whispers. “Let me help you.”

“Why?” Tsukki asks, voice rough. “Why do you want to help me so badly?”

_Because you hate volleyball. Because someone important to you loves it. Because you’re sad. Because you still want to be living. Because you’re tired of haunting. Because starlight doesn’t belong on earth—it belongs in the heavens._

“Because you look like you could use a little hope,” Kuroo replies. “And even though I may not be able to give you that, I think I can help you to a place better than this.”

Tsukki gives him a long, searching look. Kuroo allows himself to be eaten alive by eyes as bright as fireflies. “…Tomorrow,” Tsukki says. “Tomorrow, I’ll tell you everything.”

“It’s a date,” Kuroo laughs, and the smile doesn’t fade from his face from the moment Tsukki fluffs his hair with a gust of wind all the way home.

 

\----------------------------------------------

 

The next night, it pours.

“Mmm,” Kenma grumbles, leaning against the windowsill miserably and ignoring Inuoka’s call for another set. Kuroo is with him, frowning intently at the rain.

“It has to let up soon,” Kuroo murmurs. Kenma blinks at him in surprise, and Kuroo belatedly realizes that it’s out of character for him to be wishing to escape the gym. “Tired,” he offers as explanation. it was the end of training camp, after all. Who wouldn’t be tired?

Too bad Kenma knew him too well to be fooled by a half-baked lie. Kenma tilts his head, a single forehead crease betraying his worry. Kuroo flees to coach before Kenma can interrogate him.

“What’s the forecast like?” He asks. “It’s getting late and we have to leave early. Despite everyone’s enthusiasm, they need to be rested for the ride home.”

“We know that,” Naoi-san sighs. “There’s just no getting around this storm, unfortunately.” Kuroo’s stomach sinks.

By the time the skies clear enough for the teams to leave, Kuroo is over an hour late to see Tsukki. What’s worse, he can’t seem to get away. The coaches expect him to be looking after the wayward first years, Yaku expects him to quiet down the second years, and Kenma expects him to be a warm shelter, buried underneath his jacket.

“Kenma, you’re slowing us down,” Kuroo sighs as they end up trailing at the end of the Nekoma Volleyball Club pack. “We’re going to be left behind.”

“And what a shame it would be if you just happened to disappear, maybe back to the gym because someone forgot something, maybe to that mysterious place you never talk about, who knows,” Kenma says conversationally.

Kuroo feels overwhelming affection for Kenma and his perceptiveness. “…Thank you,” Kuroo says softly. Kenma makes a shooing motion, and Kuroo melts into the shadows.

He _runs_ to the house, ignoring the dangers of the slippery tiles on the roads, just praying that Tsukki would wait for him, would believe that Kuroo meant what he said and would be there for him. He turns the corner, throwing himself through the door, calling out for Tsukki.

“Tsukki! Tsukki, I’m sorry, I got held up because of the storm!” No answer.

“Hey, Tsukki?” Not in the living room. The bathroom. His bedroom. Worry trickles cold down Kuroo’s back like rain.

“Tsukki?” His voice is soft as he moves down the hallway. The feeling of coldness and darkness is back, but Kuroo recognizes it for what it is now—Tsukki’s sorrow, the thing tying him to this world. He pushes the door to _that_ room open.

Tsukki is curled tight in a ball around the same uniform, looking just as broken as Kuroo remembers having seen him, as broken as the glass photo frames and tattered as the old pictures. Something here was so, so wrong, if only Kuroo could put the pieces together.

“Tsukki…” He breathes, and the ghost boy startles into a sitting position, eyes wide.

“Kuroo…” He whispers. “But I thought you were—the storm—”

Kuroo frowns. “What’s wrong?”

“Today, it’s…” Tsukki starts, voice wavering. “It’s the anniversary of our death.”

All the air leaves Kuroo’s lungs. _Our death._ _Our._ Something was terribly wrong. He slides to the floor next to Tsukki. “Please,” he begs. “Tell me everything.”

Tsukki closes his eyes and takes a breath to steady himself. “All my life, I thought Akiteru was an amazing volleyball player. He was the captain in middle school, so naturally, I believed he was a starting player in high school.” _Akiteru,_ Kuroo thinks, but his mind translates the name to _brother_.

“Every time I asked him about practice or about his games, he always seemed so enthusiastic about Karasuno, how good they were, how well everyone was playing.” Tsukki exhales. “I didn’t read through the lines. I didn’t realize how little Akiteru talked about his own plays, or when he did, they were vague and uninspiring. If I could have only realized…” He shakes himself.

“Being the stupid, prideful kid I was, of course when someone in my class insulted Akiteru I had to defend him, even if that meant going to one of his games although he never really wanted me too. And then…the illusion fell apart when I saw him in the stands, cheering instead of playing.” Tsukki laughs, bitter. The wind flutters in the room, restless. “Why didn’t I leave it at that? Yes, I was disappointed, but…” A shutter snaps against the house.

“Tsukki…” Kuroo starts.

“I ran away,” Tsukki says dully. “I ran away on a rainy night with only the clothes on my back and without an umbrella. Akiteru drove out to get me, caught me at the edge of town.” He shrugs. “It’s not that unique of a story. There was a drunk driver, there was a cliff, neither of us saw it coming…it didn’t even hurt. I think we died instantly. Not a big deal anymore. Only…”

“Only, if you hadn’t ran away,” Kuroo says softly. “If you had talked to him. If you had realized sooner that he wasn’t a regular. If you had walked faster or slower and been at a different place at a different time.”

“Wh-what?” Tsukki asks, voice wavering.

“Those are all things you thought, right?” Kuroo surmises with a sad smile. “Everything you could have done differently. Blaming yourself for his death, over and over, for forty years. Tsukki…it’s not your fault.”

“It is,” Tsukki insists quietly.

“It _isn’t_ ,” Kuroo says, stronger this time. “There’s no way you could have known. You were only a kid. You were hurting because of how much you loved your brother—how much you _love_ him now. How could someone like that be responsible for his death? It’s called an accident for a reason.”

A single tear falls from Tsukki’s gold eyes, silvery and as intangible as the rest of him. “When you didn’t come, I thought you had—”

“I’m fine,” Kuroo says warmly. “I’m fine, but don’t you think there’s someone on the other side who’s a little less fine? Who is wondering where you’ve been for forty years? Don’t you think you ought to give him a big hug when you meet him?”

“Gross,” Tsukki complains, but his voice is thick with emotion. “As if I would ever.”

“I’m 100% sure little Tsukki gave his brother hugs and kisses all the time,” Kuroo says with a grin.

“Never,” Tsukki protests. Hesitates. “…Tsukishima.”

“Huh?” Kuroo says.

“My name,” Tsukki sighs. “It’s Tsukishima Kei.”

 _Tsukishima Kei_. Kuroo smiles. “I think I’ll just stick with Tsukki.”

Tsukki rolls his eyes. “I think it’s about time I got going,” he says.

“Already?” Kuroo asks, voice small.

“Yes. I’ve wallowed in my sorrows long enough.” He coughs. “Thank you.”

Kuroo holds up a hand. Tsukki blinks at him in confusion, but meets him, palm to palm. For a moment, Kuroo swears he can feel Tsukki’s starlight skin. “I really would have like to go on that date,” Kuroo admits.

“Try me in your next life,” Tsukki snorts. “Key word: try. I won’t make it easy for you.”

“Good thing I never back down from a challenge, then,” Kuroo laughs.

“I wouldn’t expect any less.” Tsukki is smiling, the tiniest, tiniest thing, but it is real. “Goodbye, Kuroo Tetsurou. Until we meet again.”

“Goodbye, Tsukki.”

When Tsukki moves on, it is not the fading away of a candle into the darkness, but the flash of a firework, all glimmering points of his spectral skin glowing bright before they are swept away in a gust of wind, leaving only the memory of smiling golden eyes on the back of Kuroo’s eyelids. He closes his eyes, savoring the memory, and whispers:

“Until we meet again.”


End file.
